Category Archives: From the Editor

Five Years of Teaching Culture

Five years ago this fall we launched an experiment. As an editor at a university press, with an interest in ethnographic methods and a mandate for publishing teaching-oriented texts, I wanted to connect with a community of people that wasn’t always easy to find. That community included anthropologists who wanted to think through their research differently and publish for a broader audience, as well as those who were particularly interested in finding new ways to engage their students. We decided we would start a blog: Teaching Culture, after the name of our teaching-oriented ethnography series. read more…

  • dateDecember 21, 2017
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  • posted byAnne
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Making #AmAnth17 Manageable: The Teaching Culture Top 30

What would the AAA be without the Teaching Culture Top 30 list? Every year we scour the AAA program and try to winnow it down to a short list of recommended sessions. We acknowledge it’s an almost impossible task, and only ever a partial list, but we attempt it anyway. As usual, there are a good number of recommended sessions that deal with teaching. That is our mandate after all. But in honor of the publication of our first ethnoGRAPHIC novel, we are also turning the spotlight on sessions that expand the possibilities for ethnography to work in a variety of multi-modal formats. read more…

  • dateNovember 22, 2017
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  • posted byAnne
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Q&A: On Illustration, Collaboration, and Anthropology

This month, we launch our first graphic novel and the first book in our new ethnoGRAPHIC series, Lissa: A Story about Medical Promise, Friendship, and Revolution. This project is the result of a collaborative effort involving many players, but at the heart of the process is the collaboration between two anthropologists and two artists. In advance of the book’s publication, our editor, Anne Brackenbury, sits down with artists Sarula Bao and Caroline Brewer to discuss their role in the making of Lissa. read more…

  • dateNovember 15, 2017
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  • posted byAnne
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ethnoGRAPHIC: Extending Anthropology’s Reach, One Comic at a Time

Part of my job as an editor is to convince people to write the books I think they should write, not necessarily the ones they want to write. I’ve had some success doing so, even in the face of laughter, eye rolling, and outright rejection. In fact, some of the best books I have published came from authors who had originally put up the most resistance to my pitch. So perhaps it’s not surprising that I thought I could launch a new book series based on what some might call a wacky idea, without an academic series editor, and with no projects in hand. read more…

  • dateNovember 1, 2017
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  • posted byAnne
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Supporting the Resistance

In honor of World Anthropology Day, we wanted to thank you for your work in the undergraduate classroom and offer a glimpse into some of the texts you can expect to see from University of Toronto Press in the coming months—texts we hope will help you in continuing to fight the good fight! read more…

  • dateFebruary 16, 2017
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  • posted byAnne
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